I’ve had an idea bouncing around that I haven’t been able to form into a sentence, and I’m looking for help.

I feel like within Fully Automated there is a particular recurring concept in the application of science and medicine and engineering that is thematically tied to solarpunk philosophy, but it’s one I can’t quite describe.

One example is the use of medical putty to close wounds, and how it is incredibly physical, and messy, and interpersonal. And this is meant to resembles the way that rejuvenation typically looks is in the biological world. This is kind of a distinct alternative to things like a “hypospray” in Star Trek: their healing is very abstract. Whatever problem a patient has, it’s not visible, and it’s cure barely engages with them physically. It almost resembles prayer in its degree of clean disengagement from the problem.

None of us were born into the world packaged like an iPhone and shoved through an interdimensional mail slot. We grew from cells inside of a human body that sustained us, and then got shoved out of it covered in mucus. Hurray!

I feel like this theme is repeated in a lot of technologies: from the idea of building things out of layers of resins or other composites as opposed to just stacking a bunch of bricks to the fact that going into cyberspace still requires you to feed light into your optic nerves and vibrate your tympanic membrane instead of just shoving a magic jellybean into the characters’ brains and declaring that they’re all permanently connected to WiFi now.

But I don’t really know how to tie all of that into a sentence that explains the principle or concept that these are examples of. Does this make sense to anyone else? Possibly in a way that they can describe?

  • Andy@slrpnk.netOPM
    3·
    2 months ago

    Update: someone on the Discord server suggested a summary that I think works:

    After spending a day thinking about this I came up with

    Ecologic Emulated Complexity

    Much of the advanced technology in FA! emulates natural interdependence and evolved synergetic / symbiotic relationships. It’s not a smooth mechanical engine, but an interwoven mesh like root networks. While it may have an obvious centerpiece, all that surrounds it has synergetic properties which produces end results greater then any element of it could alone. Complex machines are already analogous to life in many ways (they go through improvements over generations, have complex interrelationships between systems, and belong to families of branching designs).

    Ecologic Emulated Complexity is a design science which extends that logic into the domain of ecology and ecosystem services. This has a side effect in that the technology is easier to repair, because it repairs itself, but also that Human empathy for animals and other living things allows them to understand and intuit problems and failures. A technology which grows from the increased understanding of the world, our interdependence, and the skills we needed to create a better world, and then reinforces them.